Category: Rock, Paper, Shotgun

As befits the “very normal gardening game” that puzzly mystery box Grunn winkingly bills itself as, the first tool I obtained was a pair of shears. The second tool I obtained was a trumpet. It doesn’t really work like a trumpet, and it does things no regular trumpet could or should do. I got a trowel next. Here’s the thing about the trowel: it’s a pretty good trowel. Nothing fancy. But recently, I keep digging up… objects. Objects most peculiar. I’ve got the weekend to sort this garden, and a cosy little shed to sleep in, so I really should just get on with it. Again, though, I must reiterate: I keep digging up… objects.

I go to clean some rubbish from the bathroom. I interact with the mirror and the game says: “You do not see anything in the mirror”. I take a note that says: I do not see anything in the mirror. I check the game again and no, I still do not see anything in the mirror. Sure it’s fine. Just a shit mirror, probably. They should get it replaced. What good is a mirror you can’t see anything in?

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Two monitor-themed Should You Bother Withs in a row? Normally my desire for editorial heterogeneity wouldn’t allow it, but while ultrawide screens have been around for donkeys’ years, 2024 seems to be welcoming a genuinely new take on gaming displays: the dual-mode monitor.

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Alice Bee (RPS in peace) wrote about platformer System Purge a while back, saying it starred a witch with a nice hop. So I tried out the demo for its sequel, System Purge: Hollow Point, and can confirm that the witch still has a nice hop. I’m thankful for this, because if the witch did not have a nice hop, the game would be maddening in a bad way. Don’t get me wrong, it’s still maddening. Just in a good way. The hop is good.

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Valve instituted a fairytale punishment for cheaters in its unreleased laney shooter Deadlock yesterday. Cheaters will now be turned into frogs, provided the other players in the match vote for it. A Counter-Strike 2 modder proved the effect in a post on Xitter after the change was mentioned in some out-of-the-way patch notes by a Valve developer.

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A new shooter set in the StarCraft universe is in the works at Blizzard, according to Bloomberg reporter Jason Schreier’s book Play Nice, via Eurogamer. The project is headed up by Dan Hay, who worked various leading roles on Ubisoft’s Far Cry series, and also a 1999 CGI film starring Jim Belushi named “The Nuttiest Nutcracker”. The real-time strategy spinoff was also mentioned during an IGN podcast that aired yesterday.

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I don’t know why we haven’t written about Mechabellum before now, but we haven’t. Let’s correct that. It’s an autobattler in which you plonk down squads of stompy robots then watch them win or lose against your opponent’s army based on the formations and upgrades you’ve chosen. After more than a year in Early Access, it’s just released version 1.0.

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Do I like citybuilders such as Cities: Skylines and SimCity 4, or do I simply like roadbuilders? I spend most of my time in both those games tweaking the network of roads and junctions that form the veins of my cities, after all, and attempting to solve traffic jams via public transport and simulation-expanding mods.

Enter Junxions, a traffic engineering game which focuses entirely on the simulation and construction of roads, railways, and pedestrian walkways, right down to the coding of the traffic lights. It’s aiming for a 2025 release and you’ll find its trailer below.

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During his tenure as the foremost newsperson of the 1980s, Atari’s Paperboy faced many grievous challenges – squabbling drunks, swarms of bees, the actual Grim Reaper – and yet, day after day he answered the noble call of journalism, lashing his basket to his doughty BMX and daring the treacherously oblique suburbs of Reaganite America.

Speaking as both a news editor and a former paperboy, who broke his mind and body hauling obese Sunday editions to the millionaire houses at the top of the valley, Paperboy is my role model. Or he would be if my role model weren’t actually Steven Spielberg’s Freakazoid. Paperboy’s heyday has long since passed into history, however, and the business of journalism has changed beyond recognition. People don’t read newspapers anymore, they just eat pizza. This, at least, is the condensed analysis offered by Food Boy, which launched this week on Steam.

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Experimental, feature-length simulation game Apartment Story is not especially brilliant, but it does feature a home invasion that’s stressful in several, systemically tangible ways I’ve never quite felt in such a specific combination from a videogame before. It’s partly a story about mental health, partly about the absolute horror of not just managing a Sim but actually being one, and partly about seeing how many wanks and cheese sandwiches you can fit into a single morning. Yes, I washed my hands afterward. Ah, but after which?

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You might remember Kara Stone as the developer of Ritual Of The Moon, a game about a banished witch that is played in bursts of five minutes a day, over the course of a lunar cycle. Alice B (RPS in peace) dedicated an article series to it back in 2019, summarising it as “a sad, quiet, meditative game about breathing and loneliness and drawing pictures in the stars”. Stone’s forthcoming Known Mysteries is a ritual of the sun, I guess. Slated for launch on 23rd October, it’s the first of several, creatively low-carbon projects that will run off a custom, solar-powered server Stone has set up on her apartment balcony in Calgary, Canada.

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